Controversial views – or common sense?

A few months ago I had to give up using my Mac Mini as my primary personal computer. I couldn’t put my finger on when, but looking back I realized it had gotten slower and slower to use since the day of purchase, and while I could understand that having two users logged on all the time while running a few services could tax a 3GB system I wasn’t happy with it becoming completely unresponsive for several seconds – sometimes minutes (!) – from what I would consider normal usage.

Yesterday I stumbled upon the solution, and it was a whole lot cheaper than buying a new and improved model (since the old computer was constantly thrashing the hard drive I figured I needed more memory, something my 2007 model was already maxed out of) or replacing the built in hard drive with an SSD.

It turns out, as I’ve already mentioned before, that Apple’s reputation when it comes to software might not be as well deserved as I’d hoped when I made the switch. While researching something else I saw blog posts where people mentioned having seen Spotlight having a hard time indexing files that undergo frequent change, and that it while doing so seemed to consume an excessive amount of real and virtual memory. The proposed solution was simple – use the Spotlight Privacy setting to exclude the offending files/folders from indexing.

So I did, and my Mac Mini is now as happy as the day I bought it. There was no problem with dual users and several services functioning well on a 3GB system. The problem was with poorly written indexing software, and I find myself adding more and more parts of my system to the exclude list (external disks – check. app databases – check. logs – check. app preferences – check) and for each addition the virtual and real memory usage of the mds process drops.

Come to think of it, the only thing I ever use Spotlight for is as an easy way to launch applications. I feel an include list instead of an exclude list would be better usability, something Apple is claimed to be good at. The default behaviour – indexing everything – seems to be the reason why the search phrase mds process returns a long list of experiences similar to mine.

Maybe more posts like this can shorten that list. So far it doesn’t seem Apple has come to the rescue.

Spotify, seen by many as the music service Napster should’ve been and thus would have saved us from the last 10 years of evil piracy, has a darker side to it as well. To understand, let’s do some history:

First, one of the suggestions from the media industry on how to “solve the piracy problem” (that still hasn’t been shown to exist, worth noting) has been to create a “broadband tax“. Everyone should pay for some imagined or real media usage to the existing rights holding companies.

I wrote about this in a column several years ago (2003, not linkable), where I referred to it as being “the most brilliant business idea I’ve ever known”. Imagine enacting laws requiring everyone to send money to a private entity that doesn’t do any actual work – when you’re the entity! (Sadly this is the case in several countries already, like Canada and Sweden, with a copy-tax on writeable media)

Naturally, file sharers and non-file sharers (in this blog post, let’s pretend that file sharing actually means distributing copyrighted works without proper support by law) have been in uproar with this silly idea. To start with, such a license scheme wouldn’t be able to know whom consumed what, and thus wouldn’t be able to distribute the eventual income fairly. It would also help to keep an outdated power structure in place (media companies of old actually did advertising, printing of media on physical substrates and costly distribution – including deals with storefronts with regards to shelf space) when it’s no longer needed (see; the Internet).

Secondly, that same industry fell in love with DRM – Digital Rights Management. Ignoring such things as the intention of law (in some countries, not-law), suddenly media wasn’t something you bought and could re-use or sell yourself (as it had always been), you instead consumed a license that could expire without warning and the things you had bought became worthless. Now, to be fair, thanks to the evil pirates DRM on audio died somewhere around 2007 and I’m projecting the end of DRM on video to begin already in 2009. After all, the world hasn’t ended and even some media company executives [children] might want to create their own ringtone from a piece of music they bought every once in a while. It might also help that there indeed were a few DRM services that closed up shop and everyone could see (and some experience) the very real threat of having paid for something that in the end amounted to nothing.

… so, let’s get back to Spotify.

1) It’s a flat tax (ad-supported or with real money) upon all its users, no matter what they listen to or how much. It’s not even a freemium-model if you want it available on your mobile.

2) You pay the equivalent of twelve full albums a year (how many of you have purchased that amount lately?) and end up owning nothing. When Spotify disappears, so will all the music.

While I’m sure I’m going to cross post some of the things I write about, the more mobile related posts will appear at Sony Ericsson blogs instead of here. I’ve kicked off with a post on It’s not about smartphones – on how some of the new devices on the market differ in their actual usage from what we’ve seen before and what that might mean.